Data center startup DayOne closes $2B+ funding round – News

DayOne Data Centers Ltd. has raised a Series C funding round worth more than $2 billion to finance its construction efforts.

The Singapore-based company announced the investment on Monday. Coatue led the raise with participation from several other institutional investors including Indonesia’s sovereign wealth fund. DayOne, which launched at the start of the year, previously raised $1.9 billion across two rounds.

The company’s flagship project is a 24-acre data center campus (pictured) in the Finnish city of Lahti. The site, which is being built at a cost of €1.2 billion, will come online early next year. It’s expected to host 120 megawatts’ worth of computing infrastructure at full capacity.

DayOne’s data center will pull in cool air from the outside to reduce the amount of power and water needed to dissipate server heat. According to the company, its facilities are optimized host liquid-cooled racks equipped with Nvidia Corp. chips. Liquid coolant circulates through the racks and absorbs heat from metal plates attached to key components.

DayOne also plans to operate data centers in other markets. In Singapore, the company is building a 20-megawatt facility equipped with a solid oxide fuel cell. That’s an energy generation device powered by oxygen from the air and hydrogen.

The chemical reaction through which hydrogen and oxygen turn into water causes each hydrogen atom to release two electrons. A solid oxide fuel cell uses those electrons to produce an electric current. In most cases, such systems are made of ceramic materials that operate at temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Companies usually build data centers by transporting construction materials to a designated location and assembling the structures onsite. DayOne, in contrast, assembles its facilities from pre-fabricated modules that are made at a factory. The company says its approach speeds up construction and lowers costs. DayOne claims it can make up to 2,500 data center modules per year, which represents 500 megawatts’ worth of computing capacity.

Inside its data centers, the company uses a custom software stack to manage graphics card racks. DayOne has created observability tools that track system health and hardware usage. According to the company, its software can also detect certain malfunctions before they cause service disruptions.

DayOne will use its newly raised capital to finance construction projects in Finland, Singapore, Japan and several other markets. The company disclosed today that it has already secured about 1 gigawatt worth of “customer commitments.” A gigawatt of electricity is enough to power several hundred thousand homes.

DayOne is at least the third data center operator to have closed a 10-figure funding round in the past six months. Lambda Inc., which offers a cloud platform optimized for artificial intelligence workloads, raised more than $1.5 billion in November. Earlier, Nscale Global Holdings Ltd. received $1.1 billion from a consortium that included Nvidia, Dell Technologies Inc. and other tech industry players.

Photo: DayOne